I'm beginning to plan a complete redesign of our departments intranet pages. As it stands, every department gets their own folder within root. They all share the same look and feel but don't use CSS everything in each file is straight up static text. Basically, if a change has to be made to the header, every file must get changed. The number of files is somewhere in the hundreds. Since we're in the process of getting a new look & feel, I figured this would be the appropriate time to redesign the structure as a whole as well. My idea was to create a new C# Web Project to utilize the C# Master Pages. Within that project, each page would use the master page. Since I know they like to make many minor cosmetic changes, master pages would make things much simpler and quite frankly, I don't have time to manually edit a header 564 (random) times. The other aspect of this site is that the root would contain a documents folder within sub folders pertaining to each fo our departments.
Guess my question is, has anyone tackled an issue like this and could shed some light as to how they fixed it.
Also, would it be worth upgrading IIS and .NET to their latest version?
If you are already working in .NET 2.0, then you shouldn't need to do any upgrades, and there won't be any additional infrastructure cost.
I would highly recommend using Master pages, as they do make it painless to have a common look and feel for your entire site.
Another cool feature of Master pages is that you can nest them together. This would let you have a common feel between all pages. And then each department would have it's own Master page nested into your top-level page.
I'll start with the cost question. You need to be using ASP.NET 2.0 or higher to take advantage of master pages. Technically the .NET framework is free, however Visual Studio is not. Visual Web Developer is free, but the license might be for non-commercial projects only. I'm not sure. IIS is also free, Windows Server 2008 is not. You are fine running on XP or Server 2000/2003. There isn't really any reason to upgrade.
I can't say that I have tackled a problem exactly like yours, but it sounds like what you need is a content management system. Some examples are the cuyahoga project, or Umbraco. These systems allow you to create a general look and feel, and store all content in a database or xml files and provide an online content editor, so the content of the pages can be managed by people that don't necessarily know HTML or Programming.
You can have a master-page hierarchy:
Master page for everyone
Master page for department A
Master page for department B
Whatever's common for everyone you set in the first master page.
Then you make a master page for department A pages - this master page's master page is the first one.
Related
We are using umbraco 7.1.3
As per client's requirement we need to create more then 550 Umbraco CMS sites for different cities with same template and asp.net user control which access data from one master database.
So we created one windows application that will create 550+ sites as per city name under one Non-Umbraco root site.
We also managed to create different Umbraco database for each site is created and moved published code under to Non-Umbraco root site and convert to application and also updated Web.config file for each site dynamically.
After that when-ever we found that our logic or UI was not correct we also update DLL, ASCX user controls and CSS to all sites through same window application.
Till now everything was going smooth, but now we have one major change and that contains new document type, template, macro and new menu needs to be added dynamically. Updating published code through windows application was easy but we don't found any way to make update Umbraco database of 500+ sites through another application.
Some websites are already updated through respective sites owners, so without affected any existing changes we need to add new macro, content, document type and menu for each site and we don't know in which Umbraco database we need to enter records?
Had already posted the same in umbraco issue tracker #U4-7105
Also in Umbraco forums #71443
Thanks & Regard
Sounds like an interesting case!
If you want to migrate items that are in the database such as document types, templates and macros you would most likely need to get a product like Courier. I can see that due to license costs this could be an issue for you with 500+ sites.
Another option could be to take a look at uSync to see if it does what you need. I don't have much experience with this package but from the looks of it, it seems like it is handling all the database bits - and everything else (files on the file system) would be handled by your application just as it is right now.
I'm asking on behalf of somebody, so I don't have too many details.
What options are available for indexing site content in an ASP.NET web site? I suspect SQL Server's Full Text index may be used if the page content is stored in the database. How would I index dynamic and static content if that content isn't stored in the DB, but in html and aspx pages themselves?
We purchased Karamasoft Ultimate Search several years ago. It is a search engine add-on for your web site. I like it because it is a simple tool that taught us searching on our site. It is pretty inexpensive and we knew we could buy later if we needed more or different features. We needed something that would give us searching without having to do a lot of programming.
Specifically, this tool is a web crawler. It will run on your web server and it will act like an end-user and navigate through your site keeping a record of your web pages, so when a real users searches, they are told the pages that have the content they want.
Keep that in mind it is acting like an end-user, so your dynamic data is indexed right along with the static stuff because it indexes the final web page. We needed this feature and it is what appealed to us the most.
You can use a web crawler to crawl that site and add the content to a database which then is full text indexed. There are a number of web crawlers out there.
Lucene is a well known open source tool that would help you here. The main branch is Java based but there is a .Net port too.
Main site: http://lucene.apache.org/
.Net port: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/
Having used several alternatives I would be loath to do anything other than Google Site Search.
The only reason I use SQL Full Text Search is to search through multiple columns. It's really hard to implement it in any effective manner.
I've been doing the html and css for a site, sending it off to a guy to implement in a web server. I get a call from the designer freaking out about the progress, saying the clients aren't happy. He wants me to personally integrate my css with what's on the site. The site is done in ASP.net, time is short, and I'm a little in over my head. I have an understanding of how php works, but have never worked extensively with it.
Looking at the stuff on the ftp, I can't even find equivalent of the index.html file (I know that when I go to the site itself, there is nothing after the base url, i.e., www.site.com/ brings me to the homepage.)
Can anyone give me a few tips or links as to what I am to do with this, or where to even being navigating this site?
EDIT: It's -not- a .Net Web Application, from the looks of it.
ASP.Net can be run in a compiled or a scripted environment. It is important to understand which environment your client has. If it is completely scripted, then you are likely looking for the default.aspx file and it's contents. If it is a compiled environment, you may be in for a ride. A compiled site may incorporate "master pages" as a templating engine, and then you'll need to apply your html/css modifications in several places.
You should start with the default.aspx page if there is one. Look for master page directives (it'll be named something like masterpage.master). If there isn't one, then you're in luck you'll just need to implement your changes on a page by page basis. The aspx page will be in a templated xml format so avoid touching tags that involve touching
If you are making changes to divs and structures of that nature, you may need to modify the CssClass attribute of the controls. I would recommend however that you make a back up, give it a shot, and under no circumstances attempt to do something that you aren't really ready to do. You will only anger the client and ruin your rep. It may actually be prudent to contact an actual ASP.Net developer to analyze the files separately and determine what you need to do.
I suggest that you read the Wikipedia article about ASP.NET to get familiarized with it as it summarizes the basic building structures.
Then, just to get you started: take a look at the more recent ASP.NET MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm. There's also development in what is called ASP.NET WebForms.
For example: when you go to www.site.com/ (known as friendly URLs) it may be redirecting you to an action method inside a controller. It's called routing. There's also URL rewrite.
In the MVC world a Controller can send/redirect the user to a specific View/Page.
A View (.aspx form/page) that contais HTML markup and CSS on the server side is basically an HTML page (.htm) page that'll be rendered on the client side.
Company I work for have a site developed 6-8 years ago by a team that was enthusiastic enough to use their own private PHP-based CMS. I have to put dynamic data from one intranet company database on this site in one week: 2-3 pages. I contacted company site administrator and she showed me administrative part - CMS allows only to insert html blocks & manage site map (site is deployed on machine that is inside company & fully accessible & upgradeable).
I'm not a PHP-guy & I don't want to dive into legacy hardly-who-ever-heard-about CMS engine
I also don't want to contact developers team, 'cos I'm not sure they are still present and capable enough to extend this old days site and it'll take too much time anyway.
I am about to deploy helper asp.net site on IIS with 2-3 pages required & refer helper site via iframe from present site. New pages will allow to download some dynamic content from present site also.
Is it ok and what are the pitfalls with iframe approach?
This is the second "I'm stuck with a legacy CMS, and fixing it would be too hard" question I've seen here in the last day. I really don't see what the problem is -- I've done this in less than a day:
Pick any modern CMS and see what tools it provides for importing pages. Spend a little time learning how it stores pages. (I chose Wordpress).
Backup the CMS database.
Run a web-spider through the old system and dump all of the pages to disk as plain HTML.
For each page that you saved:
Run HTML Tidy on each HTML page to make it more uniform.
Run it through sed or perl or write a custom program (say, python with BeautifulSoup) to separate out the page content from the (no longer needed) navigational cruft.
Insert the content into a new CMS-managed page (ideally by inserting a new row in the CMS database).
Review the site and manually clean up anything that wasn't caught in the conversion.
A little bit of shell scripting can automate most of this -- just keep refining your scripts until you get most of it 'right'. If you backup the CMS database before you run your script, you can reset the site to 'empty' for each import.
(In my case, the site in question had been in use for ~10 years, with a succession of webmasters, each who used different tools and techniques for managing content, and had been hacked a couple of times by spamvertisers.)
Admittedly, this isn't a science, and it may require you to learn some new tools. Go for it -- learning new stuff is good for you, and you won't have to keep that old server running for the next 10 years, just so you can wrap its content in an iframe.
First shot at throwing a question on these boards so hopefully I can get some help, here goes:
I am working to start up the .NET practice at my client. We have 5 small scale .NET applications in place currently with a few them of them live into production. They're mostly small reporting pieces with some data entry/business logic functionality. Each of these applications is currently using the identical master pages.
What I mean is that there is a copy of the same master page in each application. They are all basic website->WCF->BL->DB tiered applications. So I have 4 copies of the same master page that I have to change when I make a change to it.
The client DOES NOT want to consolidate all of these into a single solution. They like the separation of applications across sites. I just don't want to continue dealing with the hassle of multiple updates for common elements (which there will be many more of across these applications).
The code is all stored in team foundation server. We also do NOT want to compile the master page into a .dll and deploy it.
Can anyone please make some suggestions as to how I can maintain a single copy of these common files (master, .css, etc) across my multiple applications.
thanks in advance
You might want to look at Sharing Master Pages in Visual Studio.
If that is no help then you could try using Build Events in Visual Studio. I would pick one of the projects to be my "Main Project" and only edit the master page from that project. When you build the project it would run a command that would copy that master page(if it had changed) to your set locations.
The client DOES NOT want to
consolidate all of these into a single
solution. They like the separation of
applications across sites. I just dont
want to continue dealing with the
hassle of multiple updates for common
elements (which there will be many
more of across these applications).
The code is all stored in team
foundation server. We also do NOT want
to compile the master page into a dll
and deploy it.
You eliminated the only two real options there. What all is in the master page? Would it be possible to extract the HTML UI elements to a single template or series of template HTML files and import those dynamically into the master page? You could then relocate the common HTML to an arbitrary URL and have the master page for each application pull it in dynamically.
Edit: I lied. You could also use a VirtualPathProvider like Sharepoint does to store the master page in a database or some other directory, but beware that VirtualPathProviders do not work in MediumTrust environments.
See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.hosting.virtualpathprovider.aspx
If you are using Web Applications (compiled into a dll) rather than Web Sites you can do the following:
Right click on the folder you want to store the master page in
Select "Add Existing Item..."
Browse to the master page on the file system, and select both the .master and the .master.cs files.
Then, rather than clicking on the "Add" button, click on the little down arrow to the right of Add, this will bring up a little menu with the options: "Add" and "Add As Link"
Select "Add As Link" this will reference the file in your project, while leaving it in the original location in your dev environment - this allows you to edit it in either application, while keeping it up to date in the other applications.
Obviously if you edit the code behind, you'll need to re-compile the other projects before you deploy the changes to those sites.
This isn't available in web site projects as they rely on the file structure to work out what is in the project.
EDIT: Missed the css part. Obviously you won't be able to serve those files, so this should only work for the master page.
Don't know your scenario, so
IF you can control the DNS / virtual directories to the applications you could use a format like this:
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application1
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application2
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application3
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application4
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application5
and have your Master page at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master,
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master.cs,
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master.cs.designer
Then you could reference the single copy of the master page from /../master.Master. I gave this a quick shot with a precompiled master page to make sure I could reach back beyond my root. You might have to give it a shot to see.
We use our source control to create links to the shared files in all the places that we need it. So if you edit in one place, you just need to do a get latest and it will appear in the other places you have linked it.
I ended up going with the VPP route. I created a virtual path provider and built my master page into a DLL and this is working. Now I have a massive problem though in that a Content page whos master page is late bound through the codebehind throws validation/formatting hissy fits because it thinks its should be a stand along page. my CNTRL + K, CNTRL + D has broken on every page where I'm now sharing my master page. This is extremely frustring for me and the team